The worm in the apple

Originally posted in 2006:

"How in blazes do you know all these horrors?" cried Flambeau.

The shadow of a smile crossed the round, simple face of his clerical opponent.

"Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose," he said. "Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil? But, as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren't a priest."

"What?" asked the thief, almost gaping.

"You attacked reason," said Father Brown. "It's bad theology." (G.K. Chesterton, "The Blue Cross")

I have always enjoyed reading mysteries. I began with Conan Doyle, and soon progressed to Agatha Christie, and then to Chesterton, Marjorie Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, etc. I still enjoy those authors—whether in print or in the many film and television versions. A part of the pleasure is that justice always (or almost always) triumphs. Some great evil, usually murder, is committed, peace and order is disrupted, anarchy threatens, but then order is re-established, tranquility restored and justice done.

Later, I started reading the so-called "hard-boiled" authors like Chandler and Hammett and their many successors. The moral issues tended to be much less clearly drawn and the victory of good much less complete. No one, in these books, is unambiguously good.

A sense of evil is central to all of them. It is much easier to be drawn into the books if you possess a firm belief in the reality of original sin—the flaw in every person. The "hard-boiled" stories were more realistic about evil, though, since the dividing line between good and evil passes—not between us—but through each of us; and—in this life—there is no final victory for good.

For many years, now, P.D. James has been one of the best practitioners of the art of the mystery story. From a review by Ralph C. Wood of P.D. James' most recent Dalgliesh mystery novel The Lighthouse (2005):

IN HIS CELEBRATED 1948 essay on detective fiction, "The Guilty Vicarage," W.H. Auden argued that the appeal of crime novels lies in their "dialectic of innocence and guilt." A seemingly edenic community is discovered to have a murderer in its midst. Various false clues and secondary murders cast suspicion on nearly everyone and thus reveal the falseness of the community's innocence. With the almost miraculous aid of a detective who possesses superior powers of perception, the true criminal is caught and punished, as the community undergoes a catharsis that cleanses its partial guilt and restores its innocence. Hence Auden's conclusion that the detective story, though a worthy genre, is a peculiarly Protestant form of magic: a "fantasy of escape," built on the Socratic daydream that "sin is ignorance."

Auden rightly describes the pattern that obtains in the huge preponderance of crime novels—though there have always been some that elude the easy escapist comfort. The novels of P.D. James, for instance, mainly because her victims are not entirely innocent nor her villains entirely guilty. A complex admixture of good and evil lies at the moral and religious center of her work....

Either mushiness or hardness of heart prompts nearly all personal sins, James suggests, from the great to the small, from murder to gossip. The only antidote lies in the pity that seeks firm justice while acknowledging that everyone, even the worst, suffers irremediably. What we do with our suffering is what matters. Our sins most often spring not from mere ignorance, James teaches, but from false innocence. Despite Auden’s salutary warning, therefore, such detective fiction as hers enables us to confront our real guilt.

First Things November 2006: Books in Review

True Grit

 

 

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's list of "10 books from 1968 worth reading today" includes several I've never read. But among those I have:

True Grit, by Charles Portis. As terrific as the 1969 and 2010 movie adaptations were, Portis' novel brings the superior pleasure of immersion in the distinctive narrative voice of Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old Bible-quoting girl who recruits the meanest possible U.S. marshal, Rooster Cogburn, to help her hunt down her father's killer. ...

10 books from 1968 worth reading today

"Pray not to talk, but to listen."

From a 2013 Ash Wednesday sermon delivered by Pastor Ben Dueholm:

...[R]emember to pray. As Jesus tells us, this doesn’t need to be a rambling monologue directed at God. If you’re like me, that’s probably why you feel self-conscious about prayer, as if you need to come up with enough good, persuasive words. But that’s the opposite of what Jesus tells us to do. Try making three times a day in which you can pray the Lord’s Prayer, even to yourself. Or read the psalms carefully. Four every day and you’ll finish the whole book by Easter. Pray not to talk, but to listen. Pray not by yourself, but with all the faithful who are praying with the same words. ....

Ash Wednesday: Starting Again | Brutally Ordinary Things

"Deliver us from Evil..."

From Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke:

.... Avril had only one prayer which he used in private nowadays. He had reached that stage in his development when its few lines seemed to him to contain the absolute maximum which, from a purely personal point of view, he dared ask of his Creator. As he climbed out of his clothes, folding each garment carefully as he had been taught sixty years before, he repeated it, drawing the blessed sense out of every exact word.

"Our Father...

When he came to the part which was most important of all to him that night, he paused and said it twice. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil."

That was it. That was what he meant. Lead us not into temptation, for of that we have already enough within us and must resist it as best we can in our own way. But deliver us, take us away, hide us from Evil. From that contamination of death cover us up. That was his prayer, and tonight it was not going to be answered. ....

Avril is an elderly Anglican clergyman.

I've posted about this book before here and here.

De-conversion

Michael J. Kruger on "The Power of De-Conversion Stories: How Jen Hatmaker is Trying to Change Minds About the Bible":

.... De-conversion stories are designed not to reach non-Christians but to reach Christians. And their purpose is to convince them that their crusty, backwards, outdated, naïve beliefs are no longer worthy of their assent. Whether done privately or publicly, this is when a person simply gives their testimony of how they once thought like you did and have now seen the light. ....

Modern examples of those in the de-conversion business are well known: Bart Ehrman, Rob Bell, Peter Enns, and (as we shall discuss below) Jen Hatmaker.

Of course, each of their stories are different. Ehrman moved from fundamentalism all the way to agnosticism, with no desire to retain the label “Christian.” In contrast, those like Bell would still consider themselves “Christian” in some fashion, maybe even an evangelical of sorts.

But what all these folks do share is the same background. They were all once what we might call traditional, evangelical Christians and have now come to see the error of their ways. Whatever they embrace, it is no longer that version of Christianity. ....

...I was particularly reminded of the power and impact of de-conversion stories when I listened to last week’s podcast of Jen Hatmaker being interviewed by Peter Enns....

And the title of her interview fits this de-conversion theme perfectly: “Changing Your Mind about the Bible: A Survivor’s Guide.” As many know, the main issue Hatmaker changed her mind about is that she now fully affirms the LGBQT lifestyle as consistent with biblical Christianity.

But, Hatmaker’s journey in this interview is not as original as it might first appear. In effect, she simply follows the same basic playbook used by Rob Bell, Bart Ehrman and others. The details may be different, but the overall point is the same.

Kruger describes the steps the "de-converted" seem to go through, using the Hatmaker interview, and responding to her comments. The steps:

• Step #1: Recount the Negatives of Your Fundamentalist Past
• Step #2: Position Yourself as the Offended Party Who Bravely Fought the Establishment.
• Step #3: Portray Your Opponents as Overly Dogmatic While You Are Just a Seeker
• Step #4: Insist Your New Theology is Driven by the Bible and Not a Rejection of It
• Step #5: Attack the Character of Your Old Group and Uplift the Character of Your New Group

He Concludes:

In the end, there’s no doubt Hatmaker’s de-conversion story will be persuasive to our postmodern world. And I am sure some will adopt her newfound theology as a result.

But, upon closer examination, it is rife with problems. While claiming to be non-judgmental, she declares the fruit of those who believe in traditional marriage as “rotten.” Despite her insistence that the Bible should be read without certainty, she offers all sorts of dogmatic claims about what the Bible teaches. While claiming her views are due to a deep study of Scripture, she offers only simplistic (and even irresponsible) explanations for the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality, while disregarding 2000 years of church history.

Yes, we should not settle for pat answers. But, sometimes the Bible does give clear answers. And when it does, we should be willing to listen and receive them.

The Power of De-Conversion Stories: How Jen Hatmaker is Trying to Change Minds About the Bible – Canon Fodder

Mysterious London

I haven't been back to London since I bought my copy of the Mystery Reader's Walking Guide: London in 1987. If I ever do return I'll probably want the newer edition (2002) even though some of its advice will also be out of date.

From the flyleaf:

As you follow the authors' step-by-step "mystery tours," you will experience London through the eyes of such characters as Lord Peter Wimsey, Lady Molly, and Philip Trent. The authors' favorite mystery writers and their works include all the tried-and-true mystery types and run the gamut from Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver to Antonia Fraser's Jemima Shore. You'll find everything from apple-checked spinsters to superspies—more than 50 writers and 100 books in all!

Each of the walking mystery tours covers a fascinating neighborhood in London and includes:

• An easy-to-follow map to all the sights and landmarks
• Must-see spots and restaurant and pub suggestions—connected when possible to the actual detective stories
• Lists of authors, books, and sleuths

You'll also find a bibliography of related books of interest and an index of people, places, and books in this guide.

Whether you stay at home or sally forth armed with umbrella, camera, and this guide in hand to track down your favorites for yourself, there is no better way to discover the "mysteries" of London.

The same authors produced the Mystery Reader's Walking Guide: England. 

An enjoyable excuse to walk.

Rejoice!

Philippians 4:4-7

Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say rejoice. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.
Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.
And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Henry Purcell: "Rejoice in the Lord alway" c. 1683

“A Verse may find him whom a Sermon flies..."

From a review of two books, one of which is O Sing unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music:

.... Reading O Sing unto the Lord set me thinking about the hymns I love—these tunes that according to Gant “did for the English what opera did for the Italians.” What gives them, beyond nostalgia, their particular power? “My Song Is Love Unknown” is a text by the mid-seventeenth-century Church of England minister Samuel Crossman, from his “Young Man’s Meditation” of 1664, which has as one of its epigraphs George Herbert’s contention “A Verse may find him whom a Sermon flies, And turn delight into a Sacrifice”:

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I,
That for my sake
My Lord should take
Frail flesh, and die?…

Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King,
Never was grief like thine.
This is my Friend,
In whose sweet praise
I all my days
Could gladly spend.

On the page these verses are by turns meditative, introspective, and outraged. They reflect Crossman’s personal saving faith and the institutional faith of the church to which he belonged, but they were actually composed at what must have been a time of anxious moral questioning for the poet. Ejected from the established church in the wake of the Restoration settlement that followed the Civil War and Interregnum of 1642–1660, he wrestled with his conscience, took the necessary oaths, and was ordained afresh in 1665. His own sense of isolation surely lent his identification with Christ’s loneliness and his need for Christ’s saving love an added intensity.

More than two and a half centuries later, in 1925, the composer John Ireland set Crossman’s poem to music, in a masterpiece of protean strophic setting—the tune as harmonized seems to open a myriad of emotional possibilities that allow it to track the text with an unerring sensitivity. At its heart, though, is a melody of ineffable tenderness....

God’s Own Music | by Ian Bostridge | The New York Review of Books

Frederick Douglass

From George Will's review of a new biography of Frederick Douglass, born two-hundred years ago this month:

.... "Here comes my friend Douglass," exclaimed Lincoln at the March 4, 1865, reception following his second inauguration. After the assassination 42 days later, Lincoln's widow gave Douglass her husband's walking stick. After Appomattox, Douglass, who had attended the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on behalf of women's suffrage, said: "Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot." If so, slavery ended not with the 13th Amendment of 1865 but with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. ....

By the time of Douglass's 1895 death, the nation was saturated with sinister sentimentality about the nobility of the South's Lost Cause: The war had really been about constitutional niceties — "states' rights" — not slavery. This, Sandefur says, was ludicrous: Before the war, Southerners "had sought more federal power, not less, in the form of nationwide enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act and federal subsidies for slavery's expansion."

Nevertheless, in the South, monuments to Confederate soldiers were erected and Confederate symbols were added to states' flags. In the North, the University of Chicago's Charles Edward Merriam, a leading progressive, wrote in a widely used textbook that "from the standpoint of modern political science, the slaveholders were right" about some people not being entitled to freedom. As an academic, Woodrow Wilson paid "loving tribute to the virtues of the leaders of the secession, to the purity of their purposes." As president, he relished making The Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, the first movie shown in the White House.

Douglass died 30 years before 25,000 hooded Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. That same year, Thurgood Marshall graduated from Baltimore's Frederick Douglass High School, en route to winning Brown v. Board of Education. Douglass, not Wilson, won the American future.

Frederick Douglass, a champion of American individualism

"Sighs and leers..."

Browsing once again in The Annotated Mother Goose I found this. I knew the first two verses but the rest was unfamiliar.

What are little boys made of? What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails And puppy-dogs' tails, That's what little boys are made of.	What are old women made of? What are old women made of? Bushes and thorns And old cow's horns, That's what old women are made of.
What are little girls made of? What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice And all that's nice, That's what little girls are made of.	What are our sailors made of? What are our sailors made of? Pitch and tar, Pig-tail and scar, That's what our sailors are made of.
What are young men made of? What are young men made of? Sighs and leers And crocodile tears, That's what young men are made of.	What are our soldiers made of? What are our soldiers made of? Pipeclay and drill, The foeman to kill, That's what our soldiers are made of.
What are young women made of? What are young women made of? Ribbons and laces, And sweet pretty faces, That's what young women are made of.

Flashman again

My brother tells me that he has recently re-read the first book of the "Flashman Papers." I previously posted this:

Asked by The American Spectator to recommend summer reading and drinks, Freddy Gray, the managing editor of the London Spectator, chose an excellent series of books and I heartily endorse his recommendation, at least for the mature reader:

At the London Spectator, we have just established a “Cad of the Year” prize.... We invented the prize partly in reaction to Country Life’s “Gentleman of the Year” award, but more as homage to the Flashman novels, which are enjoying something of a revival at the moment.

Flashman, in case you didn’t know, is English fiction’s greatest anti-hero. He first appeared as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays as the bully who torments Brown and his pious little friends, gets “beastly drunk,” and is then expelled from Rugby. George MacDonald Fraser then had the genius idea of taking on Flashman’s life and wrote a series of adventure novels, narrated by the bounder himself, Sir Harry Flashman. (Starter for ten: What’s the difference between a cad and a bounder?) Flashman gets into all sorts of scrapes, meets the greatest figures of the nineteenth century, and pulls one over all of them. He ends up a decorated military hero—even though he is always a coward, a liar, and a scoundrel.

The books are, almost without exception, outrageously funny. It’s like P.G. Wodehouse, only filthy rather than innocent. So I’ll be re-reading the best Flashy novels in the evenings this summer—and getting pleasantly unsober on white port throughout. Only white port though. Like Flashman, I know better than to mix my drinks.​

The "filth" isn't particularly erotic but is an important aspect of Flashman's extremely disreputable character. The history "Flashman" recounts is mostly accurate (and endnoted) — apart, of course, from the presence of Flashman himself. From Wikipedia:

During his travels Flashman meets people who took part in 19th-century events, including Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Otto von Bismarck, Oscar Wilde and Florence Nightingale, and he is involved as a participant in some of the century's most notable events, including the Indian Mutiny, the Taiping Rebellion, the charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Khartoum, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The books can be found at Amazon: The Flashman Papers. The Wikipedia article on The Flashman Papers includes, at the end, the books listed according to the chronology of Flashman's fictional life:

Summer Books & Drinks | The American Spectator

Trouble no more

From an atheist's appreciation of "Bob Dylan’s Soulful Christian Phase":

.... Bob Dylan has released a new box set, Trouble No More, chronicling the period of his career most controversial to critics—the three years, beginning in the late 1970s, during which he made exclusively Christian music. To anger secular listeners with great severity, Dylan’s gospel was not of the “Jesus is just alright” hippie variety. It was fire and brimstone, “sinners in the hands of an angry God” exhortation. In live performances, his introductions to songs such as “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody” and “Are You Ready” included end-of-days prophecy and warnings of hellfire for nonbelievers.

Discovering Dylan’s Christian music decades after its release, I was prepared to hate it. But it became the stage of Dylan’s chameleon-like career to which I most return. The rock-gospel trilogy of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love boasts of some of Dylan’s most powerful and impactful music. ...

In the most marvelous composition of Dylan’s Christian music, “Every Grain of Sand,” the songwriter takes measure of his entire life, and searches for some semblance of meaning and source of purpose:

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay
I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.

The questions at the heart of Dylan’s struggle are those that trouble every human life: How can we prevent our regrets from disabling our ambition? How do we face our imminent extinction with pride and strength? How do we gain the confidence to behave as if our lives matter for more than what is empirically verifiable? ....

Bob Dylan’s Soulful Christian Phase | The American Conservative

The worst form of government

I have quite a few books in my library related to Winston S. Churchill: biographies, collections of photographs, and books by himself. I acquired this one from the gift shop of the National Churchill Museum at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. From the chapter on "Government and Economies":

Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that Democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. - House of Commons

And again:

The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. No one pretends that Democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"

I had thought this next was contributed by Orson Welles to the script of The Third Man (1949). I didn't realize Welles had borrowed it from Churchill.

Look at the Swiss! They have enjoyed peace for centuries. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock! - 1938

More:

Some people's idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."

I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents.

Expenditure always is popular; the only unpopular part about it is the raising of the money to pay the expenditure. - House of Commons, 1901

The electors, based on universal suffrage, may do what they like, and afterwards they have to like what they do. - Blackpool, 1946

"We need external help..."

From a Paul Johnson essay:

Evelyn Waugh

The Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, that superbly gifted but curmudgeonly and occasionally malevolent writer, had a wickedly sharp tongue, and sometimes behaved as though he loved to inflict pain by his words. One day, a brave woman dared to ask him: 'Mr. Waugh, you say such horrible things to people, I cannot believe you are really religious. How can you behave as you do, and still remain a Christian?'

He replied with grim sincerity: 'Madam, I may be all the things you say. But believe me, were it not for my religion, I would scarcely be a human being.' ....

The truth is that all of us are Jekyll and Hyde creatures, part saint, part beast. The great strength of Christianity is that, while insisting that man is made in the image of God, it accepts that there is a radical flaw in the reproduction. From time to time, God's image is reflected in man's face as in a hideous distorting mirror. Theologians call this the doctrine of Original Sin. But this is merely to rationalize what we can all observe but cannot explain. Shakespeare, in his marvelous play Hamlet, in which he tried to pour everything he knew of man's ambivalent nature, has his hero say: 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a God!' And yet, he adds, man is the quintessence of dust. Man can be, and often is, the most destructive, cruel and malicious of creatures. When Dr. Samuel Johnson was touring the Scottish Highlands with James Boswell, Lady Macleod of Dunvegan Castle asked him if no man was naturally good. He replied: 'No madam, no more than a wolf!' Boswell: 'Nor no woman, Sir?' Johnson: 'No, Sir!'

Dr. Johnson's listeners were shocked by his rigor, but what he meant was obvious enough. We have a propensity to evil in our natures which cannot be entirely corrected from our own resources. We need external help to keep our dark side under control....

The Necessity for Christianity

What rot.

I just pre-ordered the Blu-ray of Darkest Hour. Those who know a great deal about this time and Churchill's role in it give mixed reviews of the film. One who liked the film very much was Andrew Roberts, historian and Churchill biographer. But he disliked the scene in the Underground. He explains in “Have no doubt — this was Churchill’s most certain hour.”:

Even the ludicrous scene in which Churchill goes down into the London Underground to try to ascertain the will of the people over the question of whether to fight on against Hitler was acceptable, on the grounds that Hollywood needed to include diversity in a movie that was otherwise going to be dominated by white, middle-class, middle-aged males. ....

.... Churchill has not been doing well at the movies recently….That’s why it is such a relief to watch Churchill depicted in Darkest Hour as lovable, decent and brave. However, now that McCarten has stated that the scene on the Tube is “in some ways the most truthful scene in the whole movie”, he must be challenged.

“We are very proud of that scene,” he goes on, ”because we thought it brought together all the ways and reasons in which Churchill finally made up his mind that he would not transact with the Nazis. People forget that he was full of doubt about this, but it was when he spoke to the people that all the other factors in his mind came together. It was the working class that convinced him. He was a working-class hero. And it was very characteristic of him to go off and disappear and then pop up somewhere else, so this is why we did it this way.”

What rot. Churchill was not in any doubt whatsoever about the need to fight. He did not “finally make up his mind that he would not transact with the Nazis” in May 1940; he was utterly opposed to making peace with them, and for a decade had been their most vigorous opponent in Britain. Over four fraught days of war cabinet meetings in 1940, from May 25 to 28 inclusive, he used every means to avoid having to go down the route of negotiating with Hitler.

Although Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, wanted to find out via the Italians what Hitler’s peace terms might be, Churchill repeatedly said that he was opposed to the idea. Churchill made two statements that, if wrenched out of context — which McCarten does on both occasions — sound as if he would consider Hitler’s terms if they were reasonable. When read in context, however, it is clear he was attempting to keep his fellow war cabinet members — Clement Attlee, Neville Chamberlain and Arthur Greenwood — onside by sounding as reasonable as possible, thus outmanoeuvring Halifax. No serious historian believes anything else, and the war cabinet minutes have now been in the public domain for nearly half a century.

Nor was Churchill in any way influenced by the views of the working class, except insofar as its political leaders, Attlee and Greenwood, supported him in not seeking terms (something the film does not make clear). Otherwise, the working class was not consulted, any more than any other class was. If the public had been, they might not have given the full-throated cry that McCarten assumes. No fewer than 11.6m Britons signed the Peace Ballot in 1935, and huge pacifist meetings drew thousands throughout the Phoney War.

The British Union of Fascists and the Communist Party opposed the war, and there were plenty of working-class members of both. The strikes in the factories producing Hurricanes and Spitfires in 1940 and 1941 also suggest that solidarity among the working class for Churchill’s vision was no more to be trusted than it was among any other class.

Churchill did not follow anyone in his opposition to the Nazis. He led it. The Underground scene belittles him by implying that he was so doubtful that he could not give his inspiring speeches without confirmation from others….

Via Power Line.

“Have no doubt — this was Churchill’s most certain hour.”

Strengthen the feeble knees

God, which knowest us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that for man's frailness we cannot always stand uprightly; Grant to us the health of body and soul that all those things which we suffer for sin, by Thy help we may well pass and overcome; through Christ our Lord. Amen. (Thomas Cranmer for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany)

ETERNAL and ever-blessed God, who art the Author of our life, and the end of our pilgrimage; We beseech Thee so to guide us by Thy Word and Spirit, amid all perils and temptations, that we may not wander from Thy way, nor stumble upon the dark mountains; but may finish our course in safety, and come to our eternal rest in Thee; through the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. (The Book of Common Worship, 1906)

Resist!

Via Bloomberg Law:

Excise taxes on beef, pork, and chicken could be the next big thing in a state and local tax environment that’s already comfortable with “sin tax” regimes aimed at cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, and gambling and is adapting quickly to special levies on sugar-sweetened beverages, greenhouse gases, and marijuana.

While there are no current legislative proposals imposing state or local surcharges on meat, a growing number of public health, environmental, and animal rights advocates are bullish on tax schemes addressing the mounting social costs of meat production and consumption.

“We have never been closer to a meat tax,” said Ashley Byrne, associate director of campaigns for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). “We have seen people—including meat eaters—realizing that meat is bad for their health and meat is taking this incredible toll on the environment. People seem more open than ever to an excise tax on meat. If we are going to tax tobacco, if we are going to tax soda, it absolutely makes sense to have a similar tax on meat.

First they came for tobacco...

Some hae meat and canna eat,

And some wad eat that want it,

But we hae meat and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.

Robert Burns

On Robert Burns' Day

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North, The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth; Wherever I wander, wherever I rove, The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.	Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow; Farewell to the straths and green valleys below; Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods; Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer; A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.	My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer; A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

The second verse reminded me of a book by another Scot.

A lullaby

Sleep my love and peace attend thee,      All through the night Guardian angels God will lend thee, All through the night Soft the drowsy hours are creeping Hill and vale in slumber steeping, I my loving vigil keeping All through the night.

While the moon her watch is keeping All through the night While the weary world is sleeping All through the night O'er thy spirit gently stealing Visions of delight revealing Breathes a pure and holy feeling All through the night.

In Welsh:

"Be ye men of valour"

In Winston Spencer Maccabee" Meir Soloveichik writes about the first speech Churchill delivered to the British people after becoming prime Minister:

.... The Nazis had thus far destroyed every adversary that they had faced, leaving in their wake a “group of shattered states and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians—upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.” Noting that he was speaking on a celebratory day in the Christian calendar, Churchill then concluded with an apparent scriptural citation—a rare rhetorical choice for him—as inspiration to his country at the most perilous moment in its history.

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.”

Thus ended Churchill’s first radio address as prime minister to the British people, which has come to be known as the “Be Ye Men of Valour” speech. ....

Winston Spencer Maccabee | commentary